The Accidental Family (12 page)

“I’m thinking I should make this coffee a decaf,” Carmen said, pressing her lips together. “Slow down, darling, you’ve only had the ring on your finger for five minutes. Last time I saw you, you were all ‘oh no I can’t possibly marry him.’ And now it’s ‘I’ve got to get him down the aisle quick before he changes his mind!’ What’s changed? Are you pregnant?”

“No, I am not pregnant; why does everybody think I’m pregnant!” Sophie said loudly enough to make two hikers look up at her from their full English breakfasts. “Which reminds me, thanks very much for feeding me a false line about Louis and the bloody surfing holiday.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Carmen apologized. “It’s just that you looked nervous and I wanted to help calm you down, get you to the restaurant so the poor bloke could ask you at least. I had no idea you’d be so …”

“So what?” Sophie asked.

“Enthusiastic.” Carmen shrugged, crossing her arms. “I was fully expecting you to say no.”

“Me too,” Sophie said. “I really did right up until the moment he asked me. I was thinking, oh please, god, don’t ask me, and then he did and then I said yes and then …”

“What?” Carmen asked her on bated breath.

“Then I realized how I’d feel if I ever lost him, and worrying and waiting and wondering didn’t seem important anymore. Carmen, I’m getting married, of course I’m enthusiastic! Enthusiastic is the watchword of brides everywhere. Do you want to see my engagement ring?”

Sophie thrust her hand under Carmen’s nose and wiggled her fingers.

“Of course I want to see the ring!” Carmen took Sophie’s fingers in hers and peered at them.

“Babe, it’s perfect. Not huge, mind you, but who wants a huge one anyway? They’re simply vulgar. My husband bought me a massive rock when we got engaged and it didn’t make us any happier. Plus, it’s very you. Louis really thought about it. You can tell.” She met Sophie’s eyes as she smiled and then, without warning, she flung open the hatch that divided her from her public and engulfed Sophie in an icing-sugar–scented hug, sending the weighty, glossy wedding magazines slipping and slapping onto the floor in slow motion.

“I’m so happy that you’re so happy …you two, you’re just perfect together.”

Sophie was touched and a little surprised to see tears in Carmen’s eyes.

“And so are you and James,” Sophie reminded her. “You and James are one of the loveliest, happiest couples I know.”

“I know …,” Carmen said, tears beading on her waterproof mascara. It seemed as if she might be about to add a “but” but none came. “And you and Louis will be too—which is why your wedding needs to be perfect.”

“It will be,” Sophie said confidently, bending to scoop up an armful of magazines. “We just need to get some venue ideas; maybe we’ll find one when we go to the wedding fair.”

“A wedding fair?” Carmen asked, as if Sophie had just suggested they hop on a bus to the moon.

“Yes, it’s in Plymouth all this week—how lucky is that?” Sophie told her. “The West Country Wedding Fair. We’re going tomorrow, I’ve just bought the tickets. Louis is on a half-day assignment taking photos for a local produce magazine, so he can pick the girls up from school, plus they give away champagne by the truckload at those places, so we’ll be laughing.”

Carmen shook her head and smiled. “You really want this, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Sophie answered. “Which is lucky because we are getting married in
three
…
months’
…
time
.” She spoke the last words slowly because she found that she was enjoying the fear coursing through her body at the very idea. “Just think, in less than ninety days from today, I could officially be married at my own wedding!”

“Well, why wait?” Carmen said as she sat down at the table with Sophie and leafed through a magazine. “Where did waiting ever get anyone? If you’re sure, you’re sure, and let’s face it, if you’ve said yes, then you ought to be sure. Besides, the quicker it is the better it will be for those girls. If you wait much longer, for one thing they will explode from excitement, and for another they won’t be
quite
as cute anymore—no offense, they are lovely kids—I’m just saying, for the photos, younger is cuter …ooooh, look at that dress! We’re going to try on wedding dresses, I bloody love that.”

“We?”

“You, I mean you,” Carmen said quickly. “Just think, Sophie, and remember this moment, because this is it—this is the beginning of the rest of your life.”

Sophie tried really hard to stop everything, even the beat of her heart, so that she could think with a clear head. One second of total clarity was all she craved, one moment of stillness so that she might advance confidently into a million moments of mayhem from this point on, this moment where she finally left her old life behind for good.

“Give me a cake,” Sophie said, pointing at a particularly fat éclair that glistened plumply in the fresh-cream chiller.

“A cake?” Carmen quizzed her, obliging nonetheless and putting the éclair on a plate in front of Sophie. “What’s a cake got to do with it?”

“Well, if I’m getting married in ninety days, then I’ve definitely got to give up cakes and I want that one to be my very last.”

Carmen gave her a side of clotted cream for luck.

“So you’re getting married?” Grace Tregowan asked Sophie as she waited, skittish as a young colt on a spring morning, for Carmen to come and pick her up in her shiny black BMW SUV. “It’s a lovely thing, marriage, I should know, I’ve done it four times.”

“Four times, Grace?” Sophie said, dropping the net curtains and perching on the edge of the sofa in the B & B’s sitting room as Grace awaited the paternity-test results on one of the characters in the television show she was watching. “Four husbands, that’s an impressive tally!”

“Well, some women would call me greedy,” Grace said, shrugging her frail shoulders.

“Tell me,” Sophie asked her. “Did you love them all, or were three of them mistakes while you were waiting for the fourth one?”

“I loved them all, in different ways,” Grace said, drawing her arms around her middle as if she’d just felt the chill of the past. “Take my Vincent, my first husband. I met him in France during the war. Special Ops got hold of me after I got back from Paris, and they sent me back out there because I could speak the lingo like a Frenchy. Three months’ training, then they drop you in a field in the middle of bloody nowhere and tell you to remember that your name is Claudette. I was a wireless operator, sending messages back home. Vincent was running the local resistance, he was only twenty-two. These days that’s nothing, you all still act like kids well into your forties, moaning about responsibility and mortgages …”

Grace sighed. “Vincent was just a boy fighting for his country’s freedom, fighting for his life. He was so young …so serious and
so handsome; Sophie, you should have seen him. Dark hair, so thick and curly you couldn’t run your fingers through it, never mind a comb, and eyes as violet as the lavender in the lane. You have to try and imagine that we were frightened
all
the time, death was always just a heartbeat away. We saw it, smelled it all around us. We saw our friends, people we loved, killed or taken from us. It’s easy to love when you live that way—it’s hard not to love because when you love, you know you are still alive. And I loved Vincent with all my heart. We didn’t plan to get married, but then I got pregnant. And he was a good French Catholic boy. We had a secret midnight wedding in a chapel in the town, but it wasn’t legal. I never knew his real name and he didn’t know mine.”

“You married a man whose name you didn’t know—but wasn’t it sort of important to know that about him? Sometimes I think I don’t know nearly enough about Louis, but at least I know his real name. Or I think I do.”

“It wasn’t important,” Grace told her. “All I needed to know about him was that he was there, his heart beating for me. At first I used to beg him to tell me his real name, but he wouldn’t and he never asked me for mine. At first I was angry with him, but then I realized he was only trying to protect me. He didn’t ask me because he loved me. So the local priest risked his life to conduct a sham marriage, because to us it was real …it was …what’s the word? Sacred. We always said that after the war, we’d do it properly, but I think even then we knew that wouldn’t happen, we knew that one of us wouldn’t make it. I tried to keep my pregnancy a secret, but my controller found out and pulled me out. That was in 1944. I didn’t want to leave him. I was desperate to stay, even with the baby.” Grace dropped her head, her eyes traveling over her blue-veined hands. “I knew the night I said good-bye to him that it would be the last time I saw him alive. We clung to each other for the longest time in the darkness in the field where the plane landed
to pick me up, and he promised he’d be there when the baby was born …”

She trailed off, looking up into the distance.

“But he didn’t make it?” Sophie asked her, breathless.

“Killed the next week. Shot by the Nazis,” Grace said. “They always used to say, it’s when you’ve got something to live for, when you are afraid of dying, that you were in trouble, because you’d hesitate and make mistakes. They were right.”

“And the baby, is that Frank?” Sophie referred to Mrs. Tregowan’s eldest son, who she had never met but who, from Grace’s description of him, sounded frankly awful.

“No, that was my poppet, my little girl Claudette,” Grace said. “Pneumonia took her before she was three months old.” She smiled at Sophie and patted her chest where her heart was. “I keep her here now with her dad. I loved Vincent. I loved him with all of my heart. Would I have loved him if I’d met him on a normal day at a normal time when there weren’t bombs falling out of the sky and death squads on the march? To be honest, I don’t know.” She smiled at Sophie, showing her slender yellowed teeth. “The trick is, Sophie, to love while love has you. Enjoy it, savor it, revel in it. So what if you’re rushing into marriage with a man you hardly know? Marry him while you love him. What’s the point in waiting till he bores you?”

“Grace,” Sophie said as she heard Carmen’s car pull up, “did anyone ever tell you how amazing and brave you were, and did anyone ever say thank you to you?”

“What for?” Grace sniffed, looking at the TV. “I did my bit, that’s all.”

“Bloody hell,” Sophie said as she and Carmen walked into Plymouth Pavilions, where the wedding fair was being held. The huge space had been decked out with white and gold balloons and there was stall after stall of wedding paraphernalia, from dresses to table
favors to romantic doves and helium-balloon sculptures. The vast room was crowded with women of all ages, mothers and daughters, sisters and best friends, all of them with that faintly manic glint in their eyes, that special glow that said “I’m going to have a great big massive party that’s all about me and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

As she scanned the crowd, Sophie spotted the odd beleaguered-looking man, mostly fathers, but sometimes a groom trailing along after his woman like a relic from a former age, when more was required of the groom than standing at the altar and saying, “I do.”

“Look at all this wedding stuff and look at all the people here looking at all the wedding stuff. Who knew that so many people got married?” Sophie said.

“I know, and they all look a bit scary to me,” Carmen said, hooking her arm through Sophie’s. “What is it about weddings that makes women go all feral?”

“I don’t know, but what if one of them gets to my dress before I do?” Sophie asked, that manic glint lighting her eyes. “We need to get in there now.”

“We can do this,” Carmen said, as if they were about to go over the top of some trenches. “I’m a pastry chef, and you, you were the premier corporate-event organizer in London, Europe, and North America. You know everything there is to know about planning parties.”

“You’re right,” Sophie affirmed. “I’m the woman who once organized a book launch in a hot-air balloon, and two years ago I did a satellite linkup with the Russian space station for a Russian energy company. I’m Sophie Mills, none of these other chicks stands a chance.”

“Dress stands twelve o’clock,” Carmen said, pointing across the vast hall.

“Marvelous,” Sophie said. “Cover me, I’m going in.”

•      •      •

“I need cake,” Sophie said, emerging from the dress section of the exhibition with her hair tousled. Her lipstick was smudged and her shirt buttoned up wrong, as if she’d just had secret sex, except that what she had been doing was a million times better than that. She’d tried on every single style of wedding dress that had ever been brought into existence. From the giant puffy meringue to a white lace thigh-length miniskirt with a detachable train, Sophie had tried them all on and then for good measure so had Carmen. “Look, there’s the wedding-cake section. Let’s go over there and score some cake.”

“I thought you were giving up cake, because you need to if you want to wear that minidress,” Carmen said as she followed her.

“I am giving up cake. I’m just exhausted from all the lace and sequins. I can feel my blood sugar level dropping and we haven’t even started yet. I need emergency cake. It’s medicinal.”

“I like the last dress with the bustle and the sleeves,” Carmen offered as she hurried after Sophie, struggling to keep up with her friend’s sensible heels as she tottered beside her in her high-heeled ankle boots.

“God no! That one made me look like a sheep carcass dressed as mutton!” Sophie said.

“Okay, well, that gold one with the bows and the glitter effect was really something.”

“Yes, it was something. It was something that a lady does not repeat. I loved trying on all of the dresses, especially the one with the butterflies and the diamanté—”

“And the one with the neckline that was so plunging the vicar could get a good look at your navel—”

“But none of those dresses was right, Carmen. I need the right dress and I need it today or tomorrow. What am I going to do? I’ve just tried on every single wedding dress in the history of wedding dresses and I haven’t found the right one and …I really need cake. Now.

“Look over there,” Sophie said, pointing at a stall with a sign hanging over it that read
CELESTIAL CAKES—BLISS IN A BITE
. “That’s what I’m talking about.”